What does one do with a blog? Here are links to some of my favorite recent postings that highlight part of what I do with my blog. Teaching Plagiarism Roundup In honor of Mike Arnzen’s unmasking of a plagiarist, here are a few recent blog entries on academic dishonesty. Circle Games and Cyberpunk In order…
—Playing with ‘Web Album Generator’Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) I’ve got a huge backlog of digital images that I’ve wanted to post online… I’m using Web Album Generator, which automates the navigation and the thumbnail. Now making a collection of images is a lot less fiddly — though I wish it offered some way to add a…
But the surprise for Xbox was Advent Rising from Majesco, a super-stylish “Star Wars”-meets-“The Matrix” action adventure, which is being written by sci-fi author Orson Scott Card, best known for the “Ender’s Game” series of novels. When writers of his caliber want to work on videogames, it’s more proof that electronic entertainment is no passing…
Movable Mena?Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Six hundred trackbacks, and Six Apart backtracks… partly. Similar:Udacity's Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes CourseSuddenly, something that had been unthin…Academia'Little Mermaid' brings new music to the Andersen fairy tale – Pittsburgh Tribune-ReviewThe story line is similar to the Disney-…Current_EventsYes, I do feel rather awesome right now.Lost brand-new earbuds.…
You are a student. That should be enough to depress you in these tough economic Liberal dominated times, but you are troubled by a weightier burden – ITEC802. What you though would be a nice little romp in the woods has turned out to be tougher than finding weapons of mass distruction. You want your…
First, words have rules. The mansion of the Word Wizard has many rules. The game of Ad Verbum also has rules. Much of the problem-solving and puzzle-unpuzzling of the text is in recognizing the rules in play and using them to get out of sticky situations. In fact, the player (via text) and adventurer (via…
These games aren’t much fun to play, even if you are a Bush supporter. Nevertheless, it’s significant that a major political party now sees games as a useful campaigning tool. Presumably, the RNC thinks Tax Invaders will get Bush’s economic policy across to “the kids”. But it’s hard to say for certain because, so far,…
WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. What a mouthful. More simply, WordPress is what you use when you want to work with your software, not fight it. —WordPress Well, that’s enough MT freakout for today. Still waiting to hear back form SixApart. Similar:NASA Just…
Here‘sthe dilemma and confusion. Asking students to conform to a print based logic in an electronic world is not teaching anyone to think on one‘sown. Indeed, this kind of pedagogy translates into a continual academic stubbornness, a refusal to recognize the communication shifts we have experienced and are experiencing currently. Telling students to write according…
mmmmmmm Free beer….. GULP GULP GULP.. mmm MORE free beer GULP GULP GULP… (footstep) (footstep) (footstep) “HEY! stop blocking the bathroom door man, i gotta pee… What do you mean its $25 to use the bathroom!!! This is an OUTRAGE!!!” —Re:Good example of why open source != free (Slashdot) Movable Type isn’t an open source product,…
Last night I got word from our ISP that blogs.setonhill.edu will be down sometime this weekend. The reason is that the physical machine on which our blogs reside is being transferred from one owner to the other. The new owner plans to continue service as usual, so if all goes well, your blogging pleasures will…
When recruited athletes make up such a substantial fraction of the entering class in at least some colleges, is there a risk that there will be too few places for other students, who want to become poets, scientists, or leaders of civic causes? Is there a possibility that, without realizing what is leading to what,…
He began calculating frantically. He gathered data on 616 auctions, observing how much each item sold for in U.S. dollars. When he averaged the results, he was stunned to discover that the EverQuest platinum piece was worth about one cent U.S. — higher than the Japanese yen or the Italian lira. With that information, he…
MT has become crippleware, and *expensive* crippleware! No one is happy about it, and I only wonder what Six Apart were thinking when they did this. […] I find it difficult to believe that Six Apart have done this … after the history of offering a fully featured free version, I suspected that they may…
Search giant Google plans for the first time to sell ads that include images, a surprise reversal for a company that has won regard for its pioneering use of text-only marketing pitches and for keeping its home page religiously free of banner advertising. —Google to sell banner ads (ZD Net) I’m still waiting to hear back…
I’m such an important blogger that I don’t have to give you any reason as I urge, even command, you to visit this link. [W]hen famous A-listers write those self-satisfied one-line posts, they aren’t really blogging well. Instead, they are just spending the social capital they’ve already accumulated. They accumulated that social capital by first…
Blogging since 1999Â (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) It occurrs to me that it was shortly after I turned in my final grades in Spring, 1999 — six five years ago — that I started tinkering with the table of contents page for my collection of online handouts. I thought that, instead of just posting links to the…
Pattern Recognition: F:F:F must have very low traffic. (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) It just occurred to me that for someone who’s supposedly a core member of the online group F:F:F, Cayce Pollard doesn’t really spend that much time reading or posting. I’ve spent most of this academic year away from the newsgroup rec.arts.int-fiction, and as I finished…
I was a soldier. I was a sergeant, who taught five-hour training sessions on the Geneva Convention and the Laws of War. And I’m disgusted, and I hope you’ll let me tell you why. The two soldiers in the photographs, as well as the others you may have seen in more recent pictures, will be…
Henry shared the media that influenced him, including films like Operation Frontal Lobe and Isaasc Asimov sci-fi novels. He agued that every other pop culture medium has been involved in education, and games need to catch up. Even Hollywood markets films with education guides (e.g. The Alamo, which has one available on the official website).…